Skedulo
Empowering the Mobile Workforce: Driving Design Excellence at Skedulo
The Challenge
Skedulo offers a dynamic platform for managing mobile workforces, seamlessly connecting businesses with their field-based employees across diverse industries. This case study highlights my work with them over two and a half years and strategic efforts to elevate the platform’s design and ensure its robust scalability for future growth.
My Role
Lead Product Designer / Platform
Project Length
2 years
Overview
Skedulo recognised the need to enhance its platform to deliver a superior user experience, establish cohesive design standards, and build a scalable design system to support ongoing expansion. This involved the evolution of fundamental platform components and the creation of a resilient design framework.
From core pillar list view pages to AI enhanced routing, the work at Skedulo was centered around a crafted, high quality design language for complex data that was easily repeatable across a large organisation.
My Role
At Skedulo, a dynamic platform for managing mobile workforces, my mission was to champion design excellence and ensure the platform could scale robustly for the future. As Lead Experience Designer (Platform), I was the central figure driving these strategic initiatives.
The core of my work was the Skedulo Platform Design System, Breeze UI. I was the driving force behind it—defining, designing, and product managing the system to create a single, comprehensive, and scalable source of truth for the entire platform ecosystem.
This foundation allowed us to elevate the entire user experience:
- User-Centric Design: I spearheaded comprehensive User Experience Testing with in-house CX teams, developing rigorous plans, analyzing feedback, and integrating those insights directly into the design process to ensure our work demonstrably enhanced the customer experience.
- Platform Refinement: I was instrumental in the design, testing, and delivery of core platform elements, including critical list views, record views, and optimization features, ensuring they were intuitive, efficient, and consistent with the new design system.
- Business-Wide Alignment: My responsibilities included presenting new features and design concepts across the business, communicating complex design value with clear, persuasive rationale, and fostering a more design-centric culture.
Beyond the product itself, I focused on building a better team. I successfully addressed initial communication and workflow challenges, leading to the successful integration of the UK design and development teams and fostering a more cohesive, high-performing multidisciplinary delivery team within my first three months. To ensure the long-term sustainability of our design standards, I founded the Design System Guild, a cross-functional team dedicated to the system’s ongoing maintenance and evolution, guaranteeing its future viability and impact across the entire organization.
Want to dive a bit deeper?
Skedulo Platform Design System (Breeze IU)
I was the driving force behind the Breeze UI, defining, designing, and product managing the system to create a single, comprehensive, and scalable source of truth for the entire platform ecosystem, ensuring it was readily accessible and user-friendly for both designers and developers.
As opposed to just creating a design system that lived in a Figma document – I pushed to create a living briefing Storybook site, fully integrated with GitHub. This allowed us not to only have a single source of truth for the team, but a place to test the components fully working in react – and for the developers to copy and paste code.
This involved:
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Leading the delivery team to ensure efficient and innovative design implementation
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Developing a comprehensive and scalable design system applicable across the entire Skedulo platform ecosystem.
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Ensuring the design system was readily accessible and user-friendly for both designers and developers.
From core pillar list view pages to AI enhanced routing, the work at Skedulo was centered around a crafted, high quality design language for complex data that was easily repeatable across a large organisation.
User Experience testing
I spearheaded comprehensive UX testing initiatives with in-house CX teams. This involved: Developing rigorous testing plans and methodologies to effectively evaluate design usability and effectiveness. Gathering and meticulously analyzing user feedback to pinpoint key areas for enhancement. Integrating user insights directly into the design process to elevate the overall customer experience.
Platform design contributions
I was instrumental in the design, testing, and support for the delivery of core elements within the Skedulo platform. This included: Designing and iteratively improving critical list views, record views, and optimization features. Ensuring these fundamental elements were intuitive, efficient, and consistently aligned with the overarching design system. Collaborating closely with development teams to ensure seamless and accurate implementation of design specifications.
Various elements, definition documents, components and layouts across the core areas of the Skedulo platform.
Business wide presentations
My responsibilities included presenting new features and design concepts across the entire business (150+ people over 4 timezones), communicating complex design ideas with clear, persuasive rationale, and fostering a more design-centric culture in general.
I also planned and ran a number of in person workshops at our in person events in the UK – helping to engage the development, product, senior leadership and other teams with the design process – and build a shared sense of purpose.
Team integration and leadership
Beyond the product itself, I focused on building a better team and joint sense of purpose. I successfully addressed initial communication and workflow challenges, leading to the successful integration of the UK design and development teams and fostering a more cohesive, high-performing multidisciplinary delivery team within my first three months.
Design system guild creation
To ensure the long-term sustainability of our design standards, I founded the Design System Guild, a dedicated cross-functional team (product, design, development) for the system’s ongoing maintenance and evolution, guaranteeing its future viability and impact across the entire organization.
This initiative significantly contributed to the scalable expansion of the design system by:
- Establishing a dedicated cross-functional team responsible for the ongoing maintenance and evolution of the design system.
- Promoting robust collaboration and seamless knowledge sharing between different team disciplines.
- Ensuring the design system remained current and effectively met the evolving needs of the platform.
- Enabling teams to work on independent parts of the product without having to ‘reinvent the wheel’ very time they worked on new features.
Behind a simple and accesible how to integrated into the storybook, I worked with the development and product team to provide a framework to adding new components to the design system - and leverage work that had already been done.
What did it achieve?
My contributions at Skedulo have resulted in significant advancements in design consistency, operational efficiency, and platform scalability:
The Skedulo platform design system (Breeze UI) has established a robust and enduring foundation for all future design and development endeavors. Proactive user experience testing has ensured that designs are deeply aligned with user needs, demonstrably enhancing the overall customer experience.
Strategic improvements to core platform elements have demonstrably enhanced the usability and operational efficiency of the Skedulo platform. Effective business-wide presentations have successfully communicated the intrinsic value of design, fostering a more design-centric culture across the organization.
Finally, the successful integration of the UK design and development teams has streamlined collaboration and optimized project delivery timelines. The establishment of the Design System Guild has enabled the scalable and sustainable expansion of the design system, ensuring its long-term viability and impact.
David Isaacs
VP Design & Research, Skedulo
While we initially hired Matt on a short term contract, he ended up staying on to work with us for over two years! This was testament to the high standard of Matt’s product design work, his passion and enthusiasm for tackling complex platform design problems, and his open and collaborative style of working that means he brings key team members and stakeholders on the journey.
During this time Matt helped to shape a number key areas of our platform from inception through to launch, including leading our design system guild – a team that set the standard for strong product design and engineering collaboration at Skedulo.
On top of this, working with Matt is always good fun – I would not hesitate to work with Matt again should the opportunity arise.